India's AI Ambitions Rise

India's AI landscape is witnessing significant developments as domestic companies aim to reduce reliance on foreign models. Krutrim, founded by Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal, has emerged as India's first AI unicorn, securing substantial funding to develop AI infrastructure, including data centres, servers and supercomputers. Krutrim is focused on building AI that understands and responds in over 20 Indian languages.

However, Krutrim has recently faced challenges, including layoffs in its linguistics division, indicating a strategic realignment. Despite these challenges, Krutrim is developing its Krutrim 3 large language model to compete with global AI systems. Meanwhile, collaboration between the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Hugging Face seeks to enhance the accessibility and utilisation of the Vaani dataset, which aims to capture India's linguistic diversity, supporting AI applications like speech recognition and language modelling. Hugging Face recognises India as a leading nation for AI developers.